Read Online A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry - Free Book Online Page B

communion. He had a little travelling communion thing he carried. And the priest asked Willie if he wanted communion and Willie said he didn’t and then the priest took his right hand and shook it and when that was accomplished Father Buckley went on his way.

    After that battle where no one fired on them and not a shell was lobbed over at them, the survivors thought their thoughts.
    Willie kept thinking a queer thought. That he was only eighteen years of age, nineteen this coming birthday.
    ‘He should have run like the rest of us,’ was Christy Moran’s comment. ‘Not run - I mean, withdrawn.’
    ‘How do you mean, sir?’ said Willie Dunne suspiciously.
    ‘He was a fool to stay there like that, Willie; he was a fucking eejit, as a matter of fact.’
    Willie was steaming about that. He couldn’t bear to hear the sergeant-major say such things. Captain Pasley had made his decision and they had made theirs. It was a sacred matter really.
    Willie wanted to say this as vigorously as he could. In fact he wanted to strike the sergeant-major for himself. It was the one time he thought maybe the sergeant-major was not just a bit of a bollocks, but a bollocks through and through. It never occurred to him that the sergeant-major might have spoken only out of his own version of sorrow.
    They buried their five hundred men, five hundred vanished hearts, in yet another new yard in the general mire of things.
    It was a while before they could fetch a lot of them in, because the Hun soon perked up, but they managed it. The Royal Army Medical Corps boys were fearless, and there was no glamour in the job at all. And the chaplains came and said their say. Father Buckley uttered familiar words, and the Protestant chaplain likewise. The little rabbi came out also, and said a few Hebrew words for Abrahamson from Dublin and a fella called Levine from Cork. Willie Dunne and his friends sang a hymn, ‘Yea, though I Go through the Valley of Death’. Christy Moran’s voice truly sounded like a kicked dog. The men who wielded the spades were thankful enough the summer was nearly there and the earth had dried but not hardened. They were small Chinese men with little moustaches and pigtails; coolies, they were called, a race of diggers that kept themselves apart or maybe were kept apart. The Chinamen dug the holes, five hundred of them. They were filled with Catholic, Protestant and Jewish Irishmen.

    Soon the places were filled with new men from home. Flocks and flocks and flocks of them, thought Willie. King George’s lambs. It was just a little inkling of a thought.

    Now summer was spent in the rearrangement and building up of their battalion - that was the official plan anyhow. Their sector quietened down. They blew the blue smoke of their fags up to the blue sky. They ate like dogs and shat like kings. They stripped to the waist and got black as desert Arabs. The white skins were disappearing. Mayo, Wicklow, it didn’t matter. They might be Algerians now, some other bit of the blessed Empire.
    They knew violent battles were afoot in other parts of the line and they all heard the hard stories of the Irish soldiers in the Dardanelles. Again and again was rehearsed the horrors of the landing in April, when lads had tried to get out of the ship The River Clyde onto the beach, and been gunned down in their hundreds as they emerged from rough holes cut in the bow. Dublin lads that had never seen a moment of battle till that moment of their death. The story always ended with the detail that the water had turned pink with the slaughter.
    ‘So you can get yourself rightly bollocksed in any corner of the earth now,’ said Christy Moran.
    ‘Is that right, Sergeant-Major?’ said Willie Dunne.
    ‘Ah, yeh, it’s not just here, Willie, boy. Sure you have a choice now.’
    ‘Well, that’s handy,’ said Pete O‘Hara jocularly.
    ‘You see,’ said Christy Moran - he happened to be trying to pull a big stain out of his tunic with old tea,